First time pool owner with problems.....

I just bought my first house in March of this year that has a 24' AG pool. I have never ever been around pools in my life so this is all new to me. The previous owner lacked in the maintanance department to say the least. He "closed" the pool with the solar cover on it so I had a mess. I started out opening it this year using HTH pool products from wally world here near by. Starting the water was pure nasty green with all kinds of leaves in it. After using algicide, 3" chlorine tablets and shocking it twice it started to clear up. Now on the fourth day and havent seen a change in the last three days. I have a sand filter with a 1hp pump on it. Looking into the problem further here in the last few days I found out that he decided to use baquacil in this pool.....ugh After reading all the problems and complaints I finally found on here how to switch it over. This morning before I did anything I tested the water and this were my readings

FC=barely 1
Alkalinity=160
Ph=7.3
CYA=10
TH=200

I read on here to change over from baquacil to chlorine to keep FC at 15ppm for a few days and to backwash to keep the filter clear. I threw 3 bags of HTH super shock in to bring the FC back up and am now testing 15. Can you tell me if im on the right track please?? My water isnt green anymore just a cloudy aqua color that wont go away. I was hoping to see to the bottom by now with the pump running 24/7 but I cant :( Thanks guys! Any help or advice is appriciated.

I would stick with bleach. I'm not sure what HTH "Shock" is--if it's Cal-Hypo, Di-Chlor, or Tri-Chlor. In any case you need to read our sections on Algae and you need to keep high levels of chlorine.

Package reads its 52% Calcium hypochlorite if that helps any. Is this going to end up messing things up worse than what they are now by using this to keep a high chlorine reading?

It's cal-hypo. It SHOULD be ok for a while--until your CH level reaches about 400. It just sometimes takes too long to dissolve. 52% is only OK... the 62% is better.

I'm gonna move this to the baquacil section of the forum. There are a lot of posts there detailing some other people's experiences converting from baq. to chlorine that might help you. Good luck and good decision to switch to chlorine. You won't be sorry you switched!

I strongly suggest that you use the cal-hypo sparingly and switch to bleach to finish your conversion. The cal-hypo is sometimes slow to dissolve and creates problems with cloudy water all by itself--and it can make already cloudy (conversion process) water even worse looking. Plus, it's easier to calculate how much bleach to add to get to a target Cl level without guessing than it is with Cal-hypo.

In any event, just keep the water at 15 ppm Cl, you'll go through some weird color changes and see "goo" in the pool, but that's all normal. Keep an eye on your pump pressure, and backwash it as the pressure rises. Keep it up until the water is blue/cloudy and you're not losing any chlorine overnight, then you can change your sand out and enjoy your nice, easy-to-maintain chlorine pool!

Janet

BTW, the trichlor pucks will have their place in the scheme of things when you're trying to accumulate CYA, but the ones from WalMart contain copper, which you don't want in your water....better to find that out now than later when you have a green tint to the water caused by the copper that won't go away!